The Ballad of Narayama

The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō, 1958) is Keisuke Kinoshita's Japanese drama, free to watch online on iFILM. In a starving mountain village, custom is merciless: once a parent turns seventy, the eldest child carries them up Mount Narayama on their back and leaves them there to die.

Orin, a hardy grandmother of sixty-nine (Kinuyo Tanaka), has made her peace with the rite long before her time comes. Her problem is that she is still strong and still useful — and that her son cannot bring himself to carry her up the slope. As she prepares him for the journey, a second, darker thread runs alongside it: a neighbouring old man dragged toward the same fate against his will. Kinoshita isn't filming folklore; he's staging a quarrel between family love and the arithmetic of survival.

What stays with you is the look of it. The whole film is shot on open studio sets in the manner of kabuki theatre — scenery shifts in plain view, the light flares red and blue, and a singer narrates the action over a shamisen. That gamble won it the top prize at the Locarno festival. Slow, ritual, deeply Japanese cinema that asks for your full attention rather than half of it. Stream The Ballad of Narayama (1958) online on iFILM.